Bridge, Tom C. L., Huang, Zhi, Przeslawski, Rachel, Tran, Maggie, Siwabessy, Justy, Picard, Kim, Reside, April E., Logan, Murray, Nichol, Scott L., and Caley, M. Julian (2020) Transferable, predictive models of benthic communities informs marine spatial planning in a remote and data-poor region. Conservation Science and Practice, 2 (9). e251.

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Abstract

Systematic conservation planning requires spatial information on biodiversity. Such information is often unavailable, forcing spatial planning to rely on assumed relationships between species and environmental features. This problem is particularly acute in large, remote marine protected areas that are proliferating rapidly. Here, we use models to predict whether (a) macrobenthic biodiversity across four taxa (gorgonians, soft corals, hard corals, and sponges) with different life histories are congruent within seascape features through regional space; and (b) models generated in an intensively-sampled area in one region can predict the occurrence of habitat-forming macrobenthos in neighboring ones. All four taxa studied showed similar habitat preferences, but high variability in distributions among and within features suggesting factors other than simple geomorphology influence these regional biodiversity patterns. Nonetheless, models derived from one region accurately predicted the presence and absence of the same taxa hundreds of kilometers away. This transferability of models of species occurrences has the potential to deliver improved reserve design in data-deficient regions.

Item ID:	80208
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2578-4854
Copyright Information:	© 2020 The Authors. Conservation Science and Practice published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Funders:	Australian Research Council (ARC)
Projects and Grants:	ARC DE180100746
Date Deposited:	28 Aug 2023 23:51
FoR Codes:	41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4104 Environmental management > 410401 Conservation and biodiversity @ 40% 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4104 Environmental management > 410404 Environmental management @ 30% 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310305 Marine and estuarine ecology (incl. marine ichthyology) @ 30%
SEO Codes:	18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1805 Marine systems and management > 180501 Assessment and management of benthic marine ecosystems @ 100%
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